It’s been a rough few years for the storied UCLA men’s basketball program.

After a few seasons with issues on-and-off the floor it appeared to be heading in a better direction under the new leadership of Steve Alford. But his tenure in Westwood didn’t get off on the right foot. The Bruins have had problems with several scholarship players over the years — Shabazz Muhammad, Reeves Nelson, Josh Smith just to name a few. The last thing they needed was for a walk-on to make the program look bad.

And that’s exactly what happened on Tuesday, as former CBT scribe and current Sporting News Associate Social Media Editor Troy Machir came across some questionable tweets.

Adria Gasol, a UCLA freshman center and younger brother of All-Star centers Pau and Marc, tweeted about George Zimmerman on Tuesday night … three days after the verdict.

The youngest Gasol has close to 8,900 followers, combine that with a sensitive subject, and you can imagine Gasol got negative feedback to his tweets. He later tweeted a link to a Reddit thread, and finally appeared to back off the initial tweet, in a response to a follower’s disagreement:

he killed, it was wrong. I don’t think he did it out of malice and maybe out of self defense. Nothing is right or wrong.

For what it’s worth, Gasol, who became a walk-on in August, didn’t play in a single game, and is currently not listed on the UCLA roster. So maybe Alford won’t have to worry about Gasol’s unpredictable tweets this winter. I’m sure he’ll have enough to deal with.

N.C. State added a dynamic wing scorer late in their 2015 recruiting efforts on Sunday as reclassified 6-foot-7 wing Maverick Rowan committed to the Wolfpack. A three-level scorer, Rowan was previously committed to Pitt and later backed off of his pledge to the Panthers before deciding to move up a grade by taking two summer…